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Get started with your Quality Management System!
What is a Quality Management System?
Put simply, the overall purpose of a Quality Management System is to support the organization in ensuring quality. It should help management systematically and continuously develop, monitor, and ensure the quality of activities, focusing on meeting customer needs. This forms the basis for continuous improvement by ensuring that the right things are done at the right time, place, and by the right people.
How do you Ensure Quality within your Business?
So, how can a Management System ensure that an organization maintains a certain level of quality? Well, it’s really about demonstrating that your organization meets the requirements of stakeholders, complies with laws, or is based on specific standards in a systematic way. With a visual Management System, you can show the world and confirm that you have included these aspects in your organization and its processes.
Why should you have a Quality Management System
There are many reasons to implement a Quality Management System, not least to be competitive. Many customers and stakeholders today require their suppliers to be certified against a specific standard. Being certified means having a management system that meets the requirements set out in the standard. ISO 9001 is an example of a world-renowned Quality Management standard. Companies and organizations use the standard worldwide to demonstrate to their stakeholders that they are achieving quality. The result of this is, among other things, increased business as you meet the requirements of customers / potential customers.
However, a quality management system is more than a certification. It is a tool to structure operations and track all activities while focusing on continuous improvement. Standardized and streamlined processes create the conditions for more cost-effective operations. As mentioned earlier, things are done in the right place and at the right time. The overview and documentation of the organization’s processes create space to identify areas for improvement.
How to Get Started
Below, we have provided a step-by-step guide with key points that are important to keep in mind when starting work on your Quality Management System:
- Define a need Before starting, it is essential to clarify the need for a Quality Management System. Do we want to be certified according to ISO 9001? What rules and standards do we want to demonstrate in the Management System? Why do we want to do this? Clarifying the need creates a good starting point for formulating goals and also makes the need visible to employees and management. This brings us to the next point:
- Anchor the project within the business Anchoring the work on the Quality Management System within the organization at an early stage is greatly beneficial. This applies at all levels, from Management, who will steer operations based on the Management System, to employees who have a deeper insight into individual processes and tasks. Getting everyone involved in the work will contribute to a more representative picture of the business and create the conditions for identifying areas for improvement at different levels.
- Designate those responsible If no one is responsible for the project and creating a Quality Management System, it can easily fall apart. Gather a group of people who can be designated as responsible for coordinating the work and mapping the processes.
- Map in Workshops Visualizing the processes together in workshops has many advantages when working with the Quality Management System. On the one hand, we get a representative picture of the business, but we can also identify the shortcomings and risks. An active dialogue about our existing processes, how we can optimize the flows and how each individual activity affects will give you a lot! Click here to learn how 2c8 Apps can facilitate your work in Workshops.
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